My landlord ordered me to pose naked in his living room

My arrangement with Adrián began as a matter of money. The penthouse on the top floor had a ridiculously low rent for what it was, and I, newly arrived in the city and broke, signed the contract without reading the fine print. The fine print wasn’t on paper. It was in his look, that first afternoon, when he handed me the keys and said, without smiling:

—Things work my way in here.

It took me two weeks to understand exactly what that meant. And by then it was already too late to want to leave.

Outside the building I was still the same as always. I went to the gym every morning, lifted weights until my muscles burned, joked with the guys about girls and matches, and kept intact that facade of a confident guy I’d spent years building. No one would have guessed a thing. I wouldn’t have guessed it about myself six months earlier either.

But the moment the elevator reached the thirty-second floor and the steel doors closed behind me, that facade stayed outside, in the street, with my clothes.

—Outside clothes contaminate the apartment’s aesthetic —Adrián had told me on the second night, with that effortless certainty of his that admitted no argument—. You don’t need them in here.

And so, floor by floor, I stopped being a person and became something more like furniture.

***

That afternoon I came back from training with my body still hot, my arms pumped, and dried sweat stuck to my skin. Adrián had brought work home. The living room was sunk in that thick silence he liked so much, broken only by the quick tapping of his fingers on the laptop keyboard.

He was seated at his desk, wearing slim reading glasses, immersed in some deal that would probably ruin someone he’d never meet. He didn’t even look up when I came in.

—Take your clothes off —he said.

I didn’t stop to think about it. My hands went to my clothes on their own, mechanical, trained. T-shirt off. Sneakers. Trousers. Underwear. I stood naked in the middle of the hallway, feeling the familiar change in temperature, the apartment’s cold air against my still-sweaty skin.

—Should I go to my room? —I asked, with the stupid hope of being able to lie down for a while.

—No. —At last he stopped typing, just for a second—. Today the light is perfect. I want you to stand by the column, near the window. Standing. Still.

—Doing what?

—Existing. Decorating.

I swallowed and obeyed. I crossed the huge living room, naked, to the column he had indicated with a tilt of his chin. The late-afternoon sun poured in through the glass, bathing the floor and walls in an amber tone that made me look like a bronze sculpture.

—Relaxed pose, but tense —he ordered, resuming his typing—. Hands behind your back. Feet shoulder-width apart. Chest out. Chin up. And don’t move.

I took position. Heels planted on the floor. Hands clasped at the small of my back. Shoulders back, chest lifted. It was a pose I’d repeated a thousand times in front of the gym mirror to check my progress. But doing it there, naked and motionless, with no mirror to give me back control, was something completely different.

I became a statue.

***

The first ten minutes were manageable. To some extent, my gym vanity enjoyed it. I could see my reflection distorted in the bulletproof glass of the window, the silhouette cut out against the city, the shadow defining the depth of my abs, the sweep of my sides. I looked big. Powerful. A work made of flesh and discipline.

But then the silence started to weigh on me.

Adrián wasn’t looking at me. Or so it seemed. He kept working, ignoring me completely, and that indifference, paradoxically, stirred me more on the inside than any caress would have. Not knowing whether he was watching me was worse than knowing.

Every time he stopped typing to think of a sentence, my heart sped up. Is he looking at me now? Does he like what he sees? The air conditioning brushed my nipples until they hardened, and the blood that should have been keeping me upright in my legs betrayed me and started migrating somewhere else.

I tried to distract myself. I went over tomorrow’s workout routine in my head, the shopping list, anything. But my mind was hijacked by the situation: naked, on display like a trophy in a man’s living room who barely spoke to me, and worst of all, my body was responding with an enthusiasm I couldn’t control.

My cock, which at first had hung heavy and sleepy, began to wake up. It wasn’t an erection all at once, but a slow, almost cruel filling. I felt it thickening, gaining weight and heat, peeling away little by little and lifting forward.

Down. Down right now.

But it didn’t go down. Stillness was an aphrodisiac. The fact that I couldn’t move, couldn’t touch myself or hide it, amplified every sensation: the air grazing the tip, the tension in my thighs, my own pulse repeating between my legs.

Adrián cleared his throat. The sound fell into the living room like thunder. I tensed without meaning to, and that tiny movement made the erection jump and reach nearly full size, rigid, obscene, completely breaking the clean line of the “statue” I was supposed to be.

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He was still typing, impassive, as if I didn’t exist. And that was exactly the point: I didn’t exist as a man, I existed as decoration. A pretty object he had decided to switch on without touching me, just with his indifference.

I focused on breathing slowly, on enduring. I felt cold sweat running down my spine, mingling with the old gym sweat. Every muscle I’d worked so hard to build was now at the service of his whim, holding a pose for no one, or for all the city’s glass peering in through the window.

***

Twenty more minutes passed. My shoulders burned from holding the position. My calves trembled slightly. But what hurt most was my groin: it was so hard the skin seemed about to split.

And then I noticed the dampness.

Cold, slick, at the tip. A drop of fluid formed at the end, shining like a tear, and began to slide down very slowly, fighting its own weight. I felt it descend along the head, gather, hesitate.

No. No, no, no.

I tried to clench to stop the flow, but clenching only made more of it pump out. My own body was betraying me in front of him. I was so turned on by being his object, by serving as mute decoration in his living room, that I was leaking on my own, without anyone touching me.

The drop fell.

It made no sound when it hit the black marble floor, but in my head it sounded like a detonation. Another formed at once. And another. I was dripping. I was staining his immaculate floor with a desire I couldn’t contain, and panic mixed with pleasure until I felt dizzy. I wanted it to stop. And at the same time, seeing my own fluid fall onto the marble made me even hotter.

Suddenly, the typing stopped.

Total silence returned to the penthouse. Adrián closed the laptop slowly. He took off his glasses and set them on the table with a soft click that made the hair on the back of my neck rise.

He said nothing. He stood up, went around the desk, and walked toward me. His steps were slow, calculated. I couldn’t move: I had been ordered to stay still. I kept my gaze fixed on the city skyline, but I felt his presence approaching like a gathering storm.

He stopped at my side. Not in front of me, but beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his body radiating against my naked flank.

He looked down. I looked down too, unable to resist.

There, on the dark mirror of the floor, right between my spread feet, were three small shiny, viscous spots. And a fourth drop was hanging, trembling, ready to join the others.

Adrián let out a long sigh. It sounded like disappointment, but with an undertone of mockery I knew all too well.

—I asked you to decorate my living room —he said, his voice brushing my ear—, not mark it like an animal.

He crouched slowly until he was at the level of my waist. He studied the drop hanging from the tip, fascinated, like someone examining a jewel.

—You’re dripping —he whispered, and his hot breath hit me straight on, ripping a gasp and an involuntary flex from my hips—. How filthy you are. I haven’t even touched you and you’re already dirtying yourself all on your own.

He lifted his gaze to me. His dark eyes shone with a promise that froze me and turned me on at the same time.

—Do you know what you do when a dog pisses on the rug? —he asked, running a finger over the tip of my cock to catch the drop before it fell. He stretched the glistening thread between his finger and my skin—. You teach it manners.

He straightened and wiped his finger on my chest, tracing a wet, cold line across my pectoral, as if signing something that already belonged to him.

—Go to the kitchen —his voice changed, turned hard, final—. Bring me a cloth to clean this up. And then get ready.

He paused deliberately, savoring it.

—We’re going to have a lesson about control. And I warn you —he added, already turning his back on me—: you’re not going to like it. At first.

I moved at last, my legs numb, my heart racing. I crossed the living room toward the kitchen, feeling the cold marble under my bare feet and, behind me, the certainty that I had stayed in that penthouse for much more than the cheap rent.